Christ and Cartoons (ish) #4: Black Panther

As I write this, I am slated to see Black Panther either tonight or tomorrow.

And yes, I realize I am very late.

The cool people (including the cool people in med school) have already seen the film one, two, three times. I have been that girl who ruins in-depth conversations about the movie because I haven’t seen the film yet. When I tell people that I haven’t seen the film yet, the reactions range from shock to scorn. You haven’t seen the film yet? What are you doing with your life??? I promise that by tomorrow, I will be in the know.

The reaction to Black Panther has been something to behold. Wakanda fever has hit nearly every black person I know! People showed up to the premiere and beyond wearing traditional African outfits, the kind of stuff they normally pull out for birthday parties and weddings. They performed large group dances in theaters and posed for endless pictures by the movie’s poster. The movie has made 940 million dollars in four weeks, more than any other Marvel film besides Captain America: Civil War and The Avengers. Even my ignorant self knows the Wakanda Forever sign; I did it as part of an African dance that my friends and I performed at the Keck School of Medicine’s annual talent show (see below).

All because of a movie made by a big-name studio with an all-black cast and an accurate portrayal of African civilization.

Let me be clear: I am very happy about Black Panther and I am very excited to (finally!) see it soon. And I don’t think anything about people’s reactions to the movie have been even close to wrong; everyone is happy to finally see some good black (and African!!!) representation on screen. And yet, when I think about Black Panther, and the way that people are obsessing over it, I cannot help but see a phenomenon that I’ve seen over and over in the past couple of years.

I think I first noticed this around 2012, when I first went to college; there, I ran head-on into a wave of Scandal obsession. From Facebook to Twitter to Tumblr, everyone was talking about Scandal. To me, people seemed especially excited about the main character, Olivia Pope, who was a strong black woman, much like the show’s director, Shonda Rhimes. (Having watched Scandal now, strong is probably an underestimation!) I had grown up watching and talking about a ton of TV shows (as you might have noticed by this series), but the way that my peers, especially my African-American female peers, talked about this show was different from what I’d heard. It was as if they saw themselves in Olivia Pope. They basked in the positive attention that Olivia Pope received, and if she received any negative attention, it was a personal affront. The amount of self-worth that people gained or lost from a character on a TV screen amazed me.

I noticed this again when ABC announced the show Black-ish in 2014. The title definitely caught my attention; TV had come up with a word for a feeling I’d had my entire life. But again, my African-American peers obsessed over this show and its existence like it was the most important show in the world at that time. It was as if black representation on TV was a vital component of their self-esteem.

And now, I feel that I’m seeing the same thing regarding Black Panther.

At this point, I have to admit something about myself. Growing up, as far as black representation, I was very spoiled. My father is a pediatric anesthesiologist, my mother a neonatologist. My sister is a general surgery resident, and my brother is about to be a dentist. Growing up, the notion of being a successful black woman wasn’t just a possibility; it was the norm, the expectation. Every two weeks, my parents would invite their friends over for Bible study. These friends were often doctors as well, and their children were held up to the same expectations as I was. I was continually surrounded by well-off black women who were raising families and advancing their careers. I was in continual contact with black peers who were not only staying in school, but doing extremely well therein. College was not an option, nor was having a productive life plan. So, as a child, even though I watched several TV shows with no black representation at all, I was able to counteract and supplement the messages I got from TV with the role models that I had in my real life.

My faith background also had a major impact on the way I watch TV and movies. Growing up, TV and movies were a special treat, to be watched only when we didn’t have homework to do. Furthermore, my parents were aware that TV did not always promote the morals that they wanted us to live by. They not only restricted us from shows that didn’t promote good morals, but they also taught us that Christian morality is very different from TV morality. My brother and I often found cartoons faster than my parents could scan them, but even when we watched shows, we watched them with the view that we were not necessarily supposed to look to the characters to represent us or to tell us what we could be. Instead, we were to look to Christ, and to other people who emulated him.

In my adolescence and young adulthood, I started to realize that I am a child of God, and that because he is the King of glory (Psalm 24, and many other sources), that technically makes me a princess. As a child of God, I have been made holy, righteous and absolutely flawless in Christ. I am settled in heavenly places, above any enemy that could come at me. I am fully able to do anything that he calls me to do, and I have an inner source of love, joy and peace for every situation. I’ve found that no person or TV character can validate my existence better than God can. He made me the way I am; he ordained my family background, my skin color and hair type. If he created me the way I am, and if every person that he created is good, then I am good. End of story.

So yes, I will be seeing Black Panther tonight, and I will probably enjoy it. But I will not look to it to tell me what I could be; I will see it knowing that I already am a King’s kid.

Christ and Cartoons #3: Pokemon

More than two years later, I return to this blog to write. I guess, just like God, that this blog is not dead.

As a short update, I graduated from Harvard in May of 2016, a year nearly to the day after my last post on this blog. I returned to Chicago for a gap year where I learned many more things about God and myself, and traveled and did interviews for medical school. I was privileged to get into the Keck School of Medicine of USC, and it is from that campus in Los Angeles, California (!!!) that I write to you today.

Of all the topics that I could have chosen to write about in two years' absence from this blog, I came back to continue my Christ and Cartoons series. Perhaps that makes me lame, but continuity is good as well. I hope to write many more of these. And now for the third installment: Pokemon.

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My parents actually banned me and my siblings from Pokemon when I was about 7 years old, as they didn't think that the show promoted good morals. Fifteen years later, for a reason that only God knows, my brother asked my mother to lift the Pokemon ban, and to our pleasant surprise, she did. (To my parents: thanks, and I'm sorry.) Despite the ban lasting more than a decade, we never really did forget the adventures of Ash and Pikachu and their friends, and we were happy to catch up on the whole thing in our free time.

Around the same time that our Pokemon ban was lifted, I got into another habit: listening to sermons from my favorite preachers in the morning before the day started. This has really helped me grow in my faith and become more emotionally stable as changes and trials come. Whenever I listen to a sermon before starting the day, I feel like my whole day goes better; it's like spiritual breakfast in that sense. I was listening to a sermon this morning called "I Am The Plan" by Jarrod Wells. He talked about the Triumphal Entry that Jesus made into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, a week before his death, and he focused on the animal that Jesus chose to ride into the city that day:

As they approached Jerusalem and came to Bethphage on the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two disciples, 2 saying to them, “Go to the village ahead of you, and at once you will find a donkey tied there, with her colt by her. Untie them and bring them to me. 3 If anyone says anything to you, say that the Lord needs them, and he will send them right away.

Of all the animals Jesus could have used to come into Jerusalem as king, he chose a donkey. He could have chosen any other ridable animal on earth--horse, pony, camel, anything--and it would have probably seemed better or more fitting for a king than a donkey. I can only imagine what the first Palm Sunday looked like as crowds stood on the streets of Jerusalem laying palm branches in front of a carpenter from Nazareth riding both a donkey and her colt. It would have been an interesting sight. But Jesus said that he needed that donkey and her colt. He had committed himself to that animal, and no other one would do.

As I was watching the pastor preach about how the donkey was central to Jesus' plan at this point in time, it reminded me of the first episode of Pokemon Indigo League. (I know what you're thinking...where is this girl's mind!? Stay with me.) The first episode begins with an excited Ash Ketchum heading straight to his mentor Professor Oak's house on his tenth birthday. Ash is finally old enough to get his first Pokemon partner and to start competing in Pokemon tournaments. Sadly, he wakes up late, so even though he heads to Professor Oak's house as fast as he can, he finds that all the other young trainers have come and taken all the other Pokemon except for a small, yellow, mouselike Pokemon by the name of Pikachu.

Cheerful as ever, Ash adopts Pikachu as his partner and starts going out into the world of Kanto to train. But as soon as he starts, he quickly finds out why Pikachu was everyone else's last choice. Pikachu is very rebellious; he won't listen to a word Ash says, and he and Ash are constantly at loggerheads. Pikachu will not get in its PokeBall (a ball where Pokemon are usually supposed to stay for transport), doesn't follow Ash's battle commands and continually uses its electric powers to shock Ash. Despite the pain and frustration, Ash doesn't give up on Pikachu and continually tries to get it to like him. Towards the end of the episode, Ash and Pikachu accidentally draw the wrath of a group of bird Pokemon, and these birds chase them and end up injuring Pikachu. As these bird Pokemon are relentlessly attacking them both, Ash begs Pikachu to get into its PokeBall so that he can protect Pikachu from any further hits.

Pikachu is overly aggressive, rebellious and lazy; there is seemingly no good reason for Ash to keep him. Ash's choice of Pokemon seems just as wrong as Jesus's choice of royal procession animal. Pikachu and the donkey were both stubborn, small, and not ideal for what they were about to do. And yet Jesus chose that donkey. Small as it was, the donkey ended up being integral for revealing Jesus as the promised Messiah, the one who would save the world. Many, many years before, the prophet Zechariah had predicted that the Messiah (Hebrew for "the anointed one") would come in exactly like Jesus did that day:

Rejoice greatly, Daughter Zion! Shout, Daughter Jerusalem! See, your king comes to you, righteous and victorious, lowly and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey. 
(Zechariah 9:9 NIV)

When Jesus came into Jerusalem riding on a donkey, he showed himself to be not just any king, but a king who would meet his people at their need and who would choose the marginalized to become part of his plan. He had been doing this his entire ministry: eating with tax collectors and prostitutes, reaching out to people across gender and racial boundaries, healing blind and lame people he found on the street. The crowds flocked to him not just because he had claimed to be King, but because they knew that he was a king for the people, that he would help them. Within the week, he would be sentenced to death, crucified, and resurrected from the grave as our risen Savior. Everything he did that week was of utmost significance for revealing God to the world, and it all started with that donkey.

Have you ever felt like Pikachu, or that donkey? Have you ever felt insignificant, forgotten or thrown by the wayside? Let me ask another question: have you gotten used to being thrown by the wayside? I'm not asking if you like it, I'm asking if you've ever felt resigned to being marginalized, like it's all the world has to offer you. You've been in that corner so long that it's become part of your identity. You're scared to leave that corner because you're afraid of getting hurt. I think this was Pikachu's problem in the episode. We don't know how long he was in Professor Oak's house; he could have been there for years getting passed up by every single trainer. By the time Ash came and actually chose him, he was probably so resigned to the fact that he would never get to fight like the other Pokemon that by the time the chance came for him to fight, he was ready to forfeit. He believed he was made for that corner of Professor Oak's house!

Okay, you're really passionate about Pokemon, you might say to me at this point. This doesn't just apply to Pokemon. I heard a story one time of a doctor who moved into an inner-city neighborhood in Chicago to work at a clinic. This doctor was white, and his neighbor was a 64-year-old black man. They got to know each other over the next few years, and like any good neighbor, the white doctor eventually invited his neighbor over to his house. The man looked at him like he had been asked to blow someone's brains out with a gun. This scenario was repeated over the next couple of years with the same response, until finally the older man accepted. The day the older man finally came to the doctor's house, he made it into the doctor's foyer. He stood, frozen, for several minutes, visibly scared until finally he burst into tears, he said, "I'm not supposed to be here", turned, and walked out.

It is an incredibly scary, yet sadly common thing, where people get beat down for so long, pushed into a corner for so long that they no longer can envision a life for themselves outside of that scenario.

Love can pull you out of that corner. Love (not puppy love or erotic love, but sustained, real love; the love that is not a feeling, but a choice made every day to be patient with people, kind to people, not envious, not boastful, not seeking their own benefit but looking out for someone else as well) will free you from the prison of low self-esteem and empower you to have a vision for your life. Love will enable you to give yourself a chance, and it will bring out things in you that you never even thought possible before.

I know this to be true for myself. Four years ago, I was a sophomore in college who had lost all hope for herself. I wasn't doing well in school at all, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, and I was intractably lazy. I contemplated leaving college probably on a daily basis. Sometimes, I thought of giving up on life itself. My parents prayed and prayed and prayed and refused to believe they had lost their daughter. At one point that fall I realized that they would not let me give up college or life because they loved me too much to let go. A couple months later, I went on a medical missions trip to Senegal, and that entire week, I was surrounded by the presence of God and the love of that entire team. In that atmosphere, I became a person I thought I'd lost forever, a person who really loved people and countries and whose dream was to travel the world and empower people. I came back from Senegal a totally different person. I realized that I was a child of God with many, many dreams and purposes that he would help me carry out. Four years later, I have a college degree from Harvard and I'm now in medical school! I am living proof of what love can do!

If you get anything from reading this post, I want you to get that God loves you, and (at the expense of being corny) God chooses you. He has wonderful plans for you, and they're good plans, not bad ones. He can take your mess and make your life beautiful. You just have to ask if he can help you. If you don't know how to ask, here's a template:

"God, I recognize that I have not lived my life for You up until now. I have been living for myself and that is wrong. I need You in my life; I want You in my life. I acknowledge the completed work of Your Son Jesus Christ in giving His life for me on the cross at Calvary, and I long to receive the forgiveness you have made freely available to me through this sacrifice. Come into my life now, Lord. Take up residence in my heart and be my king, my Lord, and my Savior. From this day forward, I will no longer be controlled by sin, or the desire to please myself, but I will follow You all the days of my life. Those days are in Your hands. I ask this in Jesus' precious and holy name. Amen."


(from allaboutgod.com)

If you do end up doing this tell me! Comment here, or message me on Facebook (my name).

(This blogpost is too long already...I didn't tell you how the episode ends! I guess I won't give you spoilers. Several seasons of Pokemon are available on Netflix, and since it's the very first episode of one of the most iconic children's animes of the '90s, I'm sure YouTube has it too. Enjoy it!)

Lessons from cartoons and video games #2/?: Digimon

My brother and I watched a lot of cartoons and played a lot of video games as children...and that hasn't changed as we've grown up. We still watch cartoons and play video games, and every so often, I find something within a cartoon or video game which I think is insightful and should be written down somewhere. Thus, this series. This is the second post, and it's all about Digimon!

UPDATE: You can now read a slightly edited version of this on the Harvard Ichthus!!!! This is the link to that: http://harvardichthus.org/2015/04/christ-and-cartoons-how-a-digimon-imitated-jesus/. What you're reading below is the original version.
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Over winter break last year, my brother and I found the second season of Digimon on Netflix, and we decided to watch that season all the way through. Note: for those who haven't seen the second season of Digimon, this blogpost will have spoilers. So if you want to watch it without spoilers, go watch it on Netflix and then come back here. It was fun to relive those Saturday mornings when we would wake up early to watch shows like Digimon as kids, and it was fun to see how we reacted as adults to some of the stuff we watched thirteen (!!!) years ago.
One thing that didn't change much was of the six main characters, my favorite character was Ken. I couldn't really explain why when I was a kid, but as an adult I figured it out. In the first part of the season, Ken was the Digimon Emperor, an evil genius who took over the Digital World (the place where all the Digimon live) and ruled it with an iron fist. He was a very cruel Emperor, making the Digimon work for him as slaves, making them evil by taking over their minds with Dark Rings, and punishing those who didn't obey. For most of the first part of the season, the five other main characters were trying to stop Ken, and everyone knew he was a jerk...except his Digimon partner, Wormmon. (People who have never watched Digimon must be finding this very weird to read! I hope you all get this.)
Wormmon had been assigned to Ken as a Digimon partner before he became the Emperor, and he remembered that before Ken became the Emperor, he was a very kind boy. However, a series of events including his brother's death and being infected with a "dark spore" made Ken very spiteful and evil. Ken even treated Wormmon like a slave, and at one point, he rejected Wormmon as his Digimon partner and tried to create a new Digimon partner for himself, one that was bigger and stronger than Wormmon. This new partner was a monster, and he eventually went mad and started destroying everything. When Wormmon realized that Ken's new partner was going to destroy everything, he finally told Ken everything he thought about him, but despite Ken's treatment of him and all the other Digimon, Wormmon told Ken that he still remembered the kind boy that Ken used to be, and that he hoped that Ken would become that person again. He then gave all of his life energy to defeat the monster, saving Ken and the other main characters. That event made Ken realize the error of his ways, and he stopped being the Digimon Emperor after that. Eventually, he joined up with the other main characters to save the Digital World. It took time for the other main characters, but eventually they were able to see Ken like Wormmon saw him: as a kind and noble person, and a hero.
I just retold a major subplot of a kids' TV show from fifteen years ago, but there are themes in that subplot that are for people of all ages in real life now. Figuratively speaking, we have all met a Digimon Emperor. Perhaps that person doesn't go around killing people and controlling their minds, but the person does have fundamental flaws that end up hurting them and the people around them. And if I'm speaking that way, about people who have missed the mark and hurt other people and have flaws and scars that they can't handle very well, then I can say with certainty that we have all been the Digimon Emperor at some point.
But I can also say, daring to hope, that there's a Ken in all of us too, someone who is kind to other people, ingenuous and has something good to share with the world. Not everyone sees it, and it may be buried beneath all the flaws. But it is there, in all of us. And we need someone, kind of like Wormmon in this plot, to see that person and never stop believing that the good kid is there somewhere. We need someone who can deal with all of our flaws and help us find the inner kindness. We need someone to take on our burdens so that we can be helped. And if we can find that person--that exceedingly rare person--they will usually succeed in bringing the good out of us, not because we were good enough to find the good, but because we know how much it cost them and we want to repay them.
People like those are hard--nay, nearly impossible to find. There's no greater sacrifice for a person than to give his or her time, energy, and even his or her own life to see a friend gain life. I dare say that there's nothing that messes with your head or your heart more than realizing that someone believed in you so much that they were willing to give your life to see you find your dreams. That's why Christianity still continues to grow today, though people's actions throughout history have sullied its name--because in Christianity, Jesus is that person. If you find a person who believes in you so much that they can bet their life on it, it might take a while, but eventually, you start believing in yourself and wanting to do better for yourself, and you don't want to go back to the way you were, because if someone gave their life for you, then your life must be worth it.

Lessons from cartoons and video games #1/?: Sonic the Hedgehog (2006)

As I mentioned in a previous post, when my brother and I were young kids, we watched a lot of cartoons and we played a lot of video games. To be honest, this hasn't changed. We have more work now, but when my brother and I are free, we usually spend time watching cartoons and/or superhero movies and playing video games. Lame? Maybe. But it's pretty fun. And occasionally in those video games and cartoons I find bits of insight that I think is worth sharing. So I'm making these insights into an unofficial series, creatively called "lessons from cartoons and video games". I don't know how regularly these posts will appear, but I can pretty much assure you that there will be more than one.

This is the first of two that I have for now. Yes, I wrote it a long time ago...but I still think it's good enough to post again. I wrote it in 2011 about a game that every Sonic the Hedgehog fan will remember in infamy: Sonic the Hedgehog (2006). There was a litany of things that were wrong about that game, from the gameplay to some of the plot elements and much more, but in general we get more insight from our mistakes then we do from our prouder moments, and for Sega, it's no different...

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Before reading this, you must know...I am a geek. According to a facebook quiz, I am seven different types of geek. So you should not be surprised by what I refer to here.


I was watching some of the cutscenes from a recent Sonic the Hedgehog game which someone had compiled into a movie, and the end really made me think. To explain the situation, the main villain of the game and the final boss is a fire-type thing named Solaris who ends up devastating everyone in the game. Solaris was originally kept as a little flame in a castle belonging to the duke of Soleanna (where the whole game takes place). At the end of the game, Sonic (our main hero) and the duke's daughter Elise go back in time to find this flame so they can blow out Solaris and save the future.


They find the flame and Elise is supposed to blow it out. Elise realizes, however, that if she blows out the flame, she and Sonic will never have met. She almost refuses to blow out the flame because she doesn't want to lose her friendship with Sonic.


Watching this happen, it's pretty hard not to scold Elise for nearly choosing Sonic over the world. And yet sometimes, we do the same thing. We forsake the mission, the life that God has planned out for us, because of something that we love that we don't want to give up. We think that thing is big, but in relation to the plan God has to (basically) save the world, it really is not.


Sometimes we may think that what we have to give up is so big and too hard to give up. However, considering that God is in control, we should know that when we give up that habit, we are helping with the great commission, the plan to get as many souls saved as possible before the end of the world.